Chapter 19: Best Fit for Him

 

She woke at seven. Her biological clock was reliable. But she had never before woken up thinking about a man — not first thing, not with that specific quality of having carried the thought through the night.

She pulled the sheets over her head.

When she'd liked Jiang Yan, it had been headlong and clear. A feeling with weight to it, declared to herself, something she could locate. This was different. Fainter, like a thread caught on something and pulling gently, too gentle to name but impossible to ignore.

She thought about his back as he'd walked away. The particular kind of lonely it had looked. Something moved through her that she couldn't settle — a mix of feeling and a kind of anxious loss she didn't know what to do with. Was it the friendship she was afraid of losing? Or was it something she didn't have a precise word for yet?

The confusion had been building for days. Sometimes it curdled into a low-level self-loathing that seemed to arrive without warning.

---

She had run into him twice since.

Once on a basketball court, once at Xie Xia's studio. Both times, his eyes had been polite and level — the earnest, particular quality she had once been struck by replaced by something that functioned similarly but was more managed. He greeted her, spoke normally, showed no sign of avoidance or strained performance. He was Zhao Qiyan: sincere, composed, exactly himself. And sometimes, in an unguarded moment, she would catch him turning his head just slightly — not away in coldness, but quietly redirecting. She guessed he was trying not to create more friction.

Without either of them marking the moment, the nods had become fewer. The private conversations had stopped. He remained, unfailingly, polite.

She had never found politeness uncomfortable before. She found his intolerable.

She saw him sometimes on her morning run. A nod, a turn, and then he was gone. All the way home she would carry it — his manner, the particular quality of the distance — and something she could only call frustration would sit in her chest. She wanted to approach him. But on what grounds? To say we're friends? She had already told him exactly what they were and weren't. She couldn't invoke that now in good conscience.

So nothing came of it, and nothing came of the time after that, and the discomfort accumulated quietly.

---

Today was a game with college friends — two couples, a doubles match, easy and familiar. Except that Ruan Jing's mind was elsewhere, and her standard dropped, and at the end she didn't read a shot correctly.

The racket went one way. She went down. Her knee hit the court and burned immediately.

"Ah Jing—" Zhang Chao was there first, pulling her upright. Mi Xiangxiang ran in from the other end with her husband: "She's bleeding."

Zhang Chao helped her to the bench outside the venue. Hospital, maybe, someone suggested. Ruan Jing said she'd rest, they should keep playing.

Zhang Chao rinsed the wound with mineral water, which made her hiss. The two men went back for singles. Xiangxiang stayed.

"Does it hurt?"

"Fine."

"You haven't been yourself today."

"I'm fine."

Xiangxiang studied her. "Don't tell me you've gotten yourself tangled up with another immovable type. You look worse than when you were chasing Jiang Yan." She glanced, with knowing casualness, in the direction Ruan Jing had been looking — an open-air squash court some distance away, where a man had been playing for a while now.

He had arrived in a sports car, walked in without looking around, removed his jacket, drank water, put on his wristbands, and started. Clean, purposeful, a quality of presence that filled whatever space he occupied. Xiangxiang had noticed him immediately when he arrived. His hitting was technically controlled and something else besides — charged, like there was more force behind it than the ball strictly required.

Ruan Jing said, flatly: "What nonsense."

Xiangxiang took her face in both hands and turned it. "Look at yourself. It's written all over you."

Ruan Jing removed her hands. "My knee hurts."

Xiangxiang frowned at the wound and said they should probably go get it properly cleaned. Ruan Jing agreed, reluctantly — it was probably nothing, but there was an old injury from a car accident in that leg, and she didn't want to be careless. They said goodbye to the others and started toward the tree-lined path.

Behind them, from a hundred meters away, someone on the squash court watched her until she disappeared.

---

Zhao Qiyan had seen her the moment he got out of the car.

On the court, she always had a quality that was difficult to look away from. Her game was understated but exquisite — baseline player, routes steady, shots unpredictable. He had thought, more than once, about what it would be like to play with her. Perfect, probably. His weakness was baseline defense. She would cover exactly what he couldn't.

She was always the best fit for him, wasn't she.

He lowered his gaze and walked to the court.

Don't look, Zhao Qiyan. You are not as controlled as you think you are.

When he drew the first ball, he knew it immediately — the suppression was insufficient. This was what happened when she was near him and unreachable: something in him that didn't respond to rational instruction pushed against the constraint, wanting to break it. He was close to his limit. The trial of giving her up had not been going well, which he was aware of; he had been deliberately showing up in places she might be. He had known she probably noticed. They had both played their parts — encounter, subtle avoidance, the practiced manners of strangers who weren't — and this tactic was entirely his own construction, and it was like pressing on a bruise repeatedly to see if it still hurt.

It still hurt. Every time.

He hit the ball.

Then she fell.

His hand on the racket tightened. He watched Zhang Chao reach her first. He watched someone bring water. He stood on his side of the court, forty meters away, holding a racket, watching her face when the water touched the wound.

She would never want him to be the one to help her up. He knew this with certainty.

But: was she hurt? Was it serious? Could he use friendship as the reason — because that was the most reasonable approach, the one she had set the terms for—

He forced it back. He knew his own capacity for self-deception too well to trust the impulse. He couldn't afford to take even the smallest step in that direction; it cost too much to walk it back.

He picked up the ball that had rolled to his feet and continued playing.

Through the trees at the court's edge, he watched Ruan Jing walk away. Her right hand on Xiangxiang's shoulder, the sun breaking through the cloud cover at that moment, catching on her face and her sports shirt at an angle that made everything look silvered and soft.

He lowered the racket.

---

"I'll go call a car, wait here."

"Let's walk, it's close."

Xiangxiang's expression indicated she found this implausible given the current pace. Before she could turn to make the call, a black car pulled up beside them on the path and stopped.

The man who got out was not anyone Xiangxiang had expected.

She looked at Ruan Jing. Ruan Jing looked back at her with an expression that was genuinely, if slightly, surprised.

Zhao Qiyan's gaze had gone directly to Ruan Jing and stayed there, something in it both direct and difficult to read.

"I'm going to the hospital," he said. And then stood.

Xiangxiang didn't understand the dynamic but understood she was the third party in it. She leaned toward Ruan Jing and murmured, "Do we know him? If not, we'll just get a car."

"Would it be too much trouble?" The question came from Ruan Jing, directed at him.

No, it wouldn't.

She considered it for a moment. "Then thank you for taking me."

Xiangxiang had been about to mention that they'd been heading to a clinic, not a hospital, but the man had already stepped forward and taken Ruan Jing's arm — not close, but with an air of having decided — and the moment for objecting had passed.

The two women sat in the back. Zhao Qiyan drove and said nothing.

Xiangxiang spent the journey trying to work out what she was looking at. These two people seemed barely acquainted and also seemed to share something wordless and unresolved. She couldn't locate them in any category she had.

He stayed at the hospital the entire time. Sat somewhere visible, said almost nothing. When Xiangxiang left, she determined he would probably see Ruan Jing home, which was the gentlemanly outcome, and so she left without pressing the point.

Getting into the taxi, she sighed to no one in particular.

"Why does Ruan Jing always find herself the difficult ones?"